Sunday, 1 February 2026

Why the moanfest?

Perhaps I should have expected it, but I was taken aback by the wave of negativity from keyboard warriors after the win at Leicester.   Only one game, we only won because we were up against ten men etc.

It seems that many fans enjoy their football most when the club is failing.   One fan characterised it as a ‘moanfest’.  But perhaps it isn’t just a Charlton phenomenon?   The following extract is from today’s Sunday Times article written by Martin Samuel.   He starts with booing at the Royal Opera House when the lead singer had to withdraw during the performance because of illness.

‘There is anger surrounding almost every club this season, but how many are in genuine crisis? Very few. There is an ocean of difference between a club battling for existence, such as Sheffield Wednesday or Morecambe, and one having a rotten season. Yet reactions are very similar: sack the manager, sack the board, protest, boycott.

Fans stayed away from Blackburn Rovers’ match with Watford last weekend, with the 11,640 crowd a 16.7 per cent fall on the season’s average. Think that helped?

“League Two football with proper owners would be better than this,” said Jamie Hoyles, of the Rovers Trust. Better than what? Blackburn aren’t going out of business. They’re having a bad year. Last May, they were in the play-off places with 30 minutes of the season to go, until conceding at Sheffield United.

 They sold players in the summer and recruited unwisely on the cheap with the technical department in disarray. Big mistakes were made. But to wish for League Two? Why catastrophise?

Even trailing at half-time is now deemed unacceptable. The boos drown any other noise. When did it come to this? ‘

I was reading an article recently about someone who had emigrated to Western Australia (admittedly a great place) and said that one reason was that people in the UK seemed so miserable and always looking for someone to blame.  ‘Broken Britain’ doesn’t seem such a bad place to live to me, although the constant rain recently is a drag.

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